Gulbransen GS (Serious)
By Les Smith
Greetings all, especially those of you sweating out an impending Gulbransen glued-stack rebuild :). You might want to file this under "things Reblitz never told me".
Gulbransen's ARE difficult to rebuild. The glued-stack ones are really tough, but even the screwed-stacks are no piece of cake. Every time I do one of these I find myself thinking "You know, I could be working on a Standard, or a Pratt-Read, or an Aeolian, or even an Autopiano right now instead of THIS"! And in the case of the glued-stack, you get only one chance to get it right. If you choose to cut it apart and make a mistake, YOU'RE DEAD! And even if you do succeed in cutting it apart, your restoration has to be near perfect, or it's simply not going to work well. There's little room for error, especially considering the small size of the bellows system. Check out a Gulbransen bellows system: It's so small that you have enough room down there for a whole case of Excedrin (which you'll probably be needing!). Now check out a Standard action or Autopiano bellows system. BIG Difference, huh? BTW just in case you're considering it, it IS cheating to replace the original Gul- bransen bellows with a Standard action bellows, in the hopes that the player will then work better! :) Lastly, consider this: suppose you do cut the stack apart (or soak it apart), rebuild it and get everything working perfectly. Your customer is delighted. Two months later, however, he calls saying that he has a MINOR problem. You get there and discover that a note in the middle of the piano is ciphering, or playing all the time because a little piece of dirt has found it's way under the valve, and the only way to fix it is to pop the valve cover and remove the valve to get to the dirt. How do you access the valve, if it's on the second or third tier? All of which leads you to the inevitable conclusion: There HAS to be an easier way. There is. Read on.
Gulbransen used to provide a ten year warranty with their players. If a problem developed with a glued-stack action, the owner ( or his tech- nician) was instructed to send the entire stack back to Gulbransen, and in turn, they sent an entirely NEW STACK back to you. (Even they didn't try to rebuild the old one!). Pretty neat, huh! In the mid-twenties even Gulbransen decided that there's got to be an easier and less expensive way and so they switched BACK to a screwed stack (which they had used in their earliest instruments. Now, if you had a problem with your stack and returned it to Gulbransen, they only had to replace the offending parts and return the original stack to you, rather than a new one. They saved big bucks that way! What about someone who bought a glued-stack Gulbransen in say 1923 and five years later developed a problem and returned it to Gulbransen for repair. Well-- now get this-- since Gulbransen was no longer making glued stacks they returned a SCREWED-STACK in it's place. That's right, the stacks were interchangeable! Get the picture?
My recommendation, therefor, if you're faced with having to rebuild a glued-stack Gulbransen, is to find an easier-to-rebuild and service screw- ed stack and substitute it for the original!!!! The biggest difference is that the glued-stack will have 88 pneumatics and the screwed-stack will only have 80. Where does one get an orphan Gulbransen screwed-stack? Well I get several calls a year from people either selling old players cheap, or sometimes giving them away for free. I always go to look at such instru- ments. Frequently I wind up giving the owners a few dollars for the player parts alone and in this manner have acquired numerous orphan player actions. Actually if you're faced with rebuilding a glued-stack action, you might want to consider buying an entire screwed-stack Gulbransen if you can get it cheap enough, just for the action alone. Make the substitution in the piano you're getting paid to rebuild, and then sell the parts piano as just a regular piano. Now why didn't Art tell you that in his book?
Les Smith
lessmith@buffnet.net |
(Message sent Fri 2 Feb 1996, 16:44:50 GMT, from time zone GMT-0500.) |
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